The Media City

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The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space

by Dr Scott McQuire

Review'If only more new media commentators had this level of historical-critical reference, engaging, good stories, and a degree of wonder at what media and windows bring to the city, to life...' - John Hutnyk, Academic Director, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University of London
'Just when you thought the last word had been said about cities and media, along comes Scott McQuire to breathe new life into the debate. When revisiting existing pathways, his always ingenious eyes produce startling and original insights. When striking out into new territory, he opens up before us inspiring new vistas. I love this book' - James Donald, Professor of Film Studies, University of New South Wales
'A book that contains sometimes audacious segues, that crams into a single chapter more insights and illustrations than seems feasible, yet which ties all threads together through a consistent, theoretically rich analysis of the interplay of media and city... Writing with effusiveness uncharacteristic of back-cover blurbs on academic tomes, James Donald says "I love this book". But I will end by echoing his praise, and make a promise to readers: you will love The Media City, too' - European Journal of Communication
'Compared to the urban studies literature of say David Harvey or Ed Soja, McQuire writes with a much greater architectural sensibility. His argument is that we move from a rather centred space of the classical renaissance city to a 'relational space' where past and future are juxtaposed not in simple Newtonian chronology but in complex relation to present. Such a transformed urbanism and media (compared with say Renaissance and Beaux Arts perspective) moves from what might be seen as the panoptic to a serial succession of photographic shots, of film frames, of movements along vistas at speed.
At stake is a city that is continually redefined by the media and understood along the lines of McQuire's quite novel media theory. At stake is a vision of media, which are too ubiquitous in the multiplication of screens, surveillance and other devices/interfaces in private and public space to primarily function any more as representations. Media in this (McQuire's) context are no longer primarily a set of representations, but constitute the very substance and fabric of urban public and private space' - Scott Lash, Goldsmiths, University of London
'…refreshingly clear, getting to grips with some of the key concepts of urban sociology in a way that moves beyond the wistful evocation and splatter of undigested terms that characterises so much academic writing on culture and cities… a clear historical and theoretically informed look at the city over the last 200 years… give us one of the most cogent accounts we have had for some time' - Media, Culture & Society

Walter Benjamin - The Arcades Project

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The Arcades Project

by Walter Benjamin

"Quite simply, the Passagen-Werk is one of the twentieth century's great efforts at historical comprehension--some would say the greatest." --T. J. Clark, author of The Painting of Modern Life The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin "To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas." Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris--glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age. The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

Faulkner and Love

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Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art

by Prof. Judith L. Sensibar

"We know a lot about William Faulkner''s drinking, his philandering, his struggles with race, sexuality and history. We know much less about why Faulkner was so spectacularly talented and so spectacularly troubled. Judith Sensibar''s magisterial new book tells how the fraught, obsessive relationships with the women in his life permeated every aspect of his art and life. Faulkner''s critics and biographers too often dismiss or caricature his mother, his "mammy," and his wife. But by uncovering important new information about Faulkner''s family life, and integrating it with intelligent readings of his fiction and poetry, Faulkner and Love places Maud Butler, Caroline Barr, and his wife Estelle Oldham Faulkner back where they belong at the center of his work and illuminates the obsessions that impelled him to write the greatest novels of the 20th century." - Diane Roberts, author of Dream State (Diane Roberts )

Ancient Greek Music - Ensemble Melpomen

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Ancient Greek Music - Ensemble Melpomen

Ensemble Melpomen

Conrad Steinman,aulos - direction

Arianna Savall,soprano - barbitos

Luis Alves da Silva,altus - kymbala

Massimo Cialfi,tympanon,krotola - salpinx

Music of the Ancient Sumerians, Egyptians & Greeks (De Organographia)

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Music of the Ancient Sumerians, Egyptians & Greeks (De Organographia)

Music from c. 1950 B.C. to 300 A.D. (Including the world's oldest notated music) performed on voice, lyres, kithara, pandoura, double reed pipes, flutes & other ancient instruments.

The Cultures of Globalization

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The Cultures of Globalization (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

by Fredric Jameson, Ioan Davies, Subramani, Barbara Trent, Sherif Hetata, Joan Martinez-Alier, Noam Chomsky

A pervasive force, globalization has come to represent the export and import of culture, the speed and intensity of which has increased to unprecedented levels in recent years. Here an international panel of intellectuals consider the process of globalization and how the global character of technology, communication networks, consumer culture, intellectual discourse, the arts, and mass entertainment have all been affected by recent worldwide trends.

Edward W. Said - presentations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures

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presentations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures

by Edward W. Said

Celebrated humanist, teacher, and scholar, Edward W. Said here examines the ever-changing role of the intellectual today. In these six stunning essays - delivered on the BBC as the prestigious Reith Lectures - Said addresses the ways in which the intellectual can best serve society in the light of a heavily compromised media and of special interest groups who are protected at the cost of larger community concerns. Said suggests a recasting of the intellectual's vision to resist the lures of power, money, and specialization. in these powerful pieces, Said eloquently illustrates his arguments by drawing on such writers as Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, Regis Debray, Julien Benda, and Adorno, and by discussing current events and celebrated figures in the world of science and politics: Robert Oppenheimer, Henry Kissinger, Dan Quayle, Vietnam, and the Gulf War. Said sees the modern intellectual as an editor, journalist, academic, or political adviser - in other words, a highly specialized professional - who has moved from a position of independence to an alliance with powerful institutional organizations. He concludes that it is the exile-immigrant, the expatriate, and the amateur who must uphold the traditional role of the intellectual as the voice of integrity and courage, able to speak out against those in power.